British teenagers are being lured into joining a Nigerian gang that forces recruits to drink blood to prove their loyalty.
Law enforcement agencies warn that the Black Axe gang is preying upon debt-ridden students and professionals working at large organisations, offering them an opportunity to make fast cash.
Some are used as ‘money mules’ who facilitate the transfer of fraudulent money through their bank accounts.
Multinational gangs including Black Axe are now responsible for a majority of the world’s cyberfraud, according to Interpol.
Recruits, who are often male, are first required to undergo an ‘initiation’ ceremony which involves being stripped, tortured and made to drink blood, before they become ‘Axemen’.
Not only does the gang target well-healed professionals, many of its recruiters often hold jobs in the IT industry.
Detectives say the gang uses Snapchat to distribute registration forms, taking advantage of instantly disappearing ‘snap’ messages to cover up their fraudulent activities, the Irish Times reported.
However, the social network’s parent company Snap Inc. insisted content suspected to be illegal is saved and reported to authorities.
Black Axe, which operates as a mafia-style organisation, has an estimated 30,000 members across dozens of countries worldwide.
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It is thought to take as much as £3.8billion from victims each year through its scams, which also include romance and inheritance frauds as well as phishing and ransomware.
Among the recruits of the scheme was 26-year-old university graduate Funmi Abimbola, who was jailed for three years last October for laundering money.
The bank worker was said to have had ‘many good qualities’, but was lured into the crime group, for which he provided bank accounts for the transfer of money.
Ireland’s Operation Skein has so far identified 1,400 individuals connected to Black Axe.
It has prosecuted more than 300 affiliated people, cautioned 39 juveniles, and identified more than 1,000 money mules during the investigation.
‘Individuals need to realise that if they act as a money mule, they are interacting with vicious transnational organised criminals’, said Garda Detective Inspector Michael Cryan.
He added that the gang ‘controls’ its recruits, demanding that they hand themselves over in the event money is stopped or frozen by their bank.
‘People who get involved in this are destroying their own futures because they could go to jail, end up with a criminal record and be prevented from getting jobs.’
Forces from 196 countries are also able to draw on data from Interpol, which has created an intelligence database on the gang.
Interpol dealt a ‘major blow’ to the gang after coordinating a huge operation which saw more than 300 people linked to Black Axe and affiliated groups arrested worldwide, including in the UK and Ireland.
The probe, codenamed Operation Jackal III, recovered £2.24million in stolen assets including luxury items and cryptocurrencies, and saw more than 700 bank accounts frozen.
It also uncovered large transactions to Nigerian bank accounts.
A senior official for the multinational crime organisation said that Black Axe were ‘early adopters’ in money transfer technology.
Tomonobu Kaya said that the rise of fintech banks, which operate digitally and have little to no physical presence, have helped facilitate the quick and seamless transfer of money around the world.
In another operation, three members of the same family in the UK were jailed for more than 16 years after being found to have worked with Black Axe’s alleged leader.
The Nakpodia siblings laundered more than £1million through email and phone scams between 2007 and 2015 for their Nigerian-based brother-in-law Augustus Bemigho-Eyeoyibo.
A BBC investigation into the Nigerian gang also found evidence of severe torture and brutality from pictures of dead bodies shared on social media.
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